


ashes to ashes

by the_garbage_will_do



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Accidental kidnapping, Brendol Hux's A+ Parenting, Dark Magic, Fix_it, Hallucinations, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Possession, Post-Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-02
Updated: 2020-10-02
Packaged: 2021-03-07 18:15:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,435
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26761948
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_garbage_will_do/pseuds/the_garbage_will_do
Summary: “One who partakes of the diverse ashes of Malachor shall wield power of all the Sith. They may then partake in the Rite of the Chasm, where one who is all shall call for what their soul wants and receive.”When Ben Solo disappears into thin air on Exegol, Hux goes off the rails. Even by his standards.
Relationships: Armitage Hux/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 20
Kudos: 62
Collections: Standard Zine





	ashes to ashes

**Author's Note:**

> Additional warnings for dirty jokes, indirect cannibalism and emetophobia.

Perhaps if the Sith wrote clearer procedural memoranda, their empires wouldn’t keep toppling.

Hux snorts like he’s in a position to judge, like the Final Order hadn’t boasted the clearest reports of any government in galactic history and crumbled to ashes within a day. Like he hadn’t added fuel to that particular fire himself.

He bites his tongue a second later, scanning the room to confirm he didn’t wake any of the smugglers he now calls colleagues and then ducking his head back down. The ship’s sleeping quarters were designed with little care and soundproofed with less, so the walls thrum in rhythm, clanging with every cycle of the engine. Hux tunes out the din. He ignores the snoring smugglers around him and the oppressively stale recycled air. With precision befitting a First Order general, he brushes his dyed brown hair out of his eyes and refocuses on the mission at hand.

In his hands is a relic pilfered off the gang’s latest haul: a genuine ritual scroll dating back to the end of the first Sith Empire. Though the paper is brittle and yellow with age, its runes remain clear. A pity that the underlying logic– decoded by a painfully slow, handheld translator Hux rebuilt from scraps– is anything but.

_“The giants of the Sith Empire shall reign for an eternity, preserved in perfect form by their own kyber rays on the lost world of Malachor...”_

Hux suppresses the snort this time, settling for a roll of the eyes. “Being petrified by your own malfunctioning superweapon” is hardly his idea of “reigning eternally in perfect form.” 

At once a little voice in his head plays devil’s advocate: _matters of the Force elude you,_ basic symbolism _eludes you, you wouldn’t appreciate a metaphor unless you could shoot something with it_

He ought to leave that little voice for dead. Instead, he smiles.

.

It’s been five years since Exegol. Five years back, General Hux of the First Order donned chest armor and declared himself a spy. Five years back he staged his death, thoroughly, lest anyone come looking for him again. 

Five years back, Kylo Ren faded into thin air, or so the Resistance staunchly claims. That tale’s always niggled at Hux, for he doesn’t believe Ren would die so easily. Hux has tried to imagine a galaxy without Ren, his ex-lover’s sighs and his self-delusions and his tantrums simply and permanently silenced, and he doesn’t accept it. Can’t.

Not that the galaxy’s ever much cared what Armitage Hux can or cannot accept. His only choice is to duck the shrapnel, to claw his way out of every pit his fate hurls him down. It’s why the galaxy reorganizes itself in yet another New Republic, while he bides his time on a rustbucket ship. It’s why he’s ingratiated himself with a gang of smugglers who peddle religious relics, some genuine and stolen, most faked. It’s why he’s dyed his hair and acquired a fake name: “Stark,” a discreet memorial to Starkiller Base _._ For a surname he’s taken up the galactically recognized marker of estranged sons and outcasts.

He’s called “Solo,” now.

His chosen ring of brigands is far from famous, unknown except to extremely peculiar collectors. Hux must count himself lucky then, that Ren was the most peculiar man he’d ever known. He learned of this gang from Ren’s old records, since one of his last acts as Supreme Leader was to go on a Sith relic shopping spree, seeking every possible clue about Palpatine’s resurrection. It had been an uncharacteristically sensible decision on Ren’s part. And when a peculiar yearning had possessed Hux after Exegol, an unnamable wanting he feared might freeze him forever, he’d nipped it quickly in the bud, moving forward, taking up the mission Ren had left unfinished.

Hux has lived for five years on that mission: finding answers. Unfortunately, the rise of the Emperor and the Final Order raised a thousand questions. Hux keeps a list:

  1. How did Palpatine cheat death?
  2. How could he raise the galaxy’s greatest fleet in secret?
  3. Snoke was a literal puppet of Palpatine’s, if the reports of Exegol’s wrecked labs hold the slightest truth. How did Palpatine create and control him?



And so on.

The Final Order’s unceremonious fall raised even more questions. Though Hux would have liked to claim credit, the third Sith Empire was doomed almost exclusively by its own lack of clarity. According to surviving cultists from Exegol, the great Palpatine changed his mind twice an hour about whether he wanted the scavenger dead or alive. Relatedly, there’s no reason to announce your regime of terror’s impending rise a mere 18 hours before your fleet’s ready. One must either break the galaxy’s will with an intimidation campaign sustained over years, or commit entirely to a stealth attack. 

The Emperor should’ve picked a lane.

And every day, even as Hux plays a placid, unmatchably competent if near-mute mechanic, he seethes. In the silence of his head he ruminates every day, stoking his own rage at the Final Order’s folly, the dysfunctional bureaucracy he was doomed from birth to serve. His rage will lead him to answers. Answers– especially where the power of the Sith is concerned– will lead him to power of his own. And once he has power, he’ll surely have a purpose again.

(And every night, the heartache rears its head and threatens to split him open, scattering his molecules across three systems, and he thinks of Ren’s _first_ act as Supreme Leader.)

.

They say it’s been five years of peace. Hux has never had any magical powers to speak of, but something in the dark tugs at him– an odd unease. They claim their precious peace and “balance,” and in the dead of night he can’t believe it.

.

_One who partakes of the divers ashes of Malachor shall wield power of all the Sith. They may then partake in the Rite of the Chasm, where one who is all shall call for what their soul wants and receive._

Even among mystical ancient texts, this ritual scroll is poorly worded: ambiguous in multiple aspects and infuriatingly vague. What’s the power of all the Sith? How diverse is “divers”? Who knows; not the poor scribe who penned this, surely.

Still the scroll burns itself into Hux’s head. Smolders down to ashes.

.

Hux turns spy. Jumps ship to a competitor, with an expedition planned to gather some of the ashes of Malachor and sell them to the highest bidder. As the newest member of the three-person crew his cut’s only 10%, but it’d still pay better than being a general did if he intended to collect.

The galaxy’s wallets open deep, with Force powers on sale.

The pilot punches in coordinates– secret coordinates to the lost world of Malachor, coordinates that the Jedi had systematically wiped from every archive they could find– and jumps to lightspeed.

“Solo, the damn motivator’s acting up again–”

Hux unsheathes the monomolecular blade hidden up his sleeve even now, and he slits the pilot’s throat. Behind him, the copilot droid barrels towards the cockpit with a mechanical screech. It goes down in sparks from a blaster bolt to the chest.

After stealing the pilot’s black overcoat– a suave and elegant gaberwool, though it hangs too large on Hux’s frame– he tosses them both out the airlock. He steals the pilot’s seat for himself, feeling inexplicably out of place.

.

Malachor.

It’s a scorching hot planet, home to a kyber weapon in a long-buried Sith Temple and not much else. It’s a grey hell, and as he drops from hyperspace Hux can’t help but recall Ilum, sliding into sight for the first time. The planet Ilum was frigid, home to an abandoned Jedi Temple, with kyber thrumming in its core. It became Starkiller.

(Hux had been reborn as a full-fledged general on Ilum. He might have saved the galaxy with Starkiller, if Ren hadn’t destroyed it first.)

As Hux pushes through Malachor’s smoggy atmosphere, the sense of unease creeps up stronger than usual. He glances backwards, suddenly possessed by the notion that the pilot might’ve reappeared behind him, watching.

He scoffs at his own irrationality. Forces his eyes forward.

.

Hux skims over the planet’s surface– a black rock, so glossy it seems more like ice. Using every sensor in his arsenal he searches for a crater recalled in legend and finds a gaping hole in the ground. Carved stone towers surround it, half of them toppled. Perhaps there was a proper crater here long ago, but its floor has collapsed, revealing yet another abyssal pit underneath. 

(Upon running a few mental calculations, Hux decides that the crater didn’t collapse of its own volition. Someone pushed it.)

He tips his ship into a nosedive, plunging into the darkness.

The pit isn’t endless. He lands smoothly on another layer of black rock, flat and waiting below. He steps out warily onto solid ground, slabs of black debris lying jagged and broken all around him. Though he’d known, though he’s had years to prepare for the sight, his heart catches in his throat.

It’s a battlefield, frozen. For centuries Jedi and Sith have stood here frozen in their fight. They warred at the end of the First Sith Empire, until the Sith’s grand superweapon backfired and petrified them all mid-battle.

(A nightmare– Starkiller, its weapon turned against the First Order, its fiery cracks swallowing the base whole– flashes before Hux’s eyes. He closes them, breathing too loud in the eerie silence, refusing to face that old wound.)

.

The phrase “ashes of Malachor” is a poetic mistranslation. A euphemism, for delicacy’s sake.

Under his newly acquired coat Hux wears denim trousers, a baggy white shirt and a blue vest he’d never be caught dead in, back in his Order days. It’s classic smuggler attire, but he’s made alterations, sewing secret compartments all over. One in his sleeve conceals his monomolecular blade. Inside his vest he’s tucked a transparisteel vial.

He approaches one of the frozen stone figures, preserved forever in a predatory crouch, one knee bent while the other stretches long to the side. Hux recognizes the pose from Ren’s fighting style. He clicks the saber still clutched in her petrified fist, and it flashes red before blinking out from age, further confirming her loyalty to the dark side.

“Ashes” is a euphemism– a light-hearted way of saying “ground-up petrified Sith bones.”

Hux collects his “ashes” efficiently, filing away at assorted statues with his monomolecular blade and catching the dust in the vial. According to the rites he requires a diverse collection, and so he flits from statue to statue, verifying that they’re Sith to the best of his ability. Perhaps he mixes a few Jedi in too, but it doesn’t overly concern him. He already desecrated their religion atrociously when he built Starkiller on top of their consecrated temple; there’s no deeper heresy to be had here.

He putters about in the dust of a long-vanquished empire and puts heresy entirely from his mind. This is his birthright, the closest he has to the elusive “legacy” Ren lost his life chasing. Hux was born the year the first Death Star was reduced to dust. Sometimes, it seems to him that he died with his Starkiller.

He approaches one figure, fallen. It’s twisted in unnatural angles, agony clear even after all these centuries. A lightsaber lingers a few inches away, where it fell from an outstretched hand, and at first when Hux lifts it he only means to check the color, to see whether it’s red like a Sith weapon should be. Yet when he flicks the on-switch, blue bursts out in every direction, in _three directions,_ from the main beam and two small lateral vents. It’s a crossguard saber, the model Kylo Ren loved and took as his own, and when the blue of its long-wearied kyber crystal at last dies with a shudder, Hux feels uncharacteristically moved to tears.

All Hux has ever loved is ash.

He fastens the saber onto his belt and keeps moving.

.

To wield the power of all the Sith, one must “partake of the ashes of Malachor.” The ritual scroll fails to specify _how_ one might partake, but most scholars interpret the passage literally. 

With the vial of dust tucked safe in one pocket, Hux returns to the ship and opens a compartment in the galley. He placed a vacuum flask within it before departing. Inside the flask waits a particularly dark serving of tarine tea, made with thrice the usual dose of tea leaves and entirely too much sugar. He’s left a fourth tea bag in all this time, so the drink is both oversteeped and oversweetened. 

He tips the dust inside and swirls it about with a spoon, hoping petrified flesh might dissolve of its own volition, and then he screws the lid back on. With the flask snug in the pocket of his new coat, he steps back outside.

At the center of the ancient battlefield looms a Sith temple, a sleek black pyramid built entirely underground, and once again Hux can’t help but think of Starkiller. He’d once overseen a shipshape hundred-story base epitomizing military organization, all buried underground on Ilum. 

The tip of the Sith pyramid has caved in, reduced to rubble. The foundation still stands.

_They may then partake in the Rite of the Chasm…_

According to a Sith map– this one preserved in a data storage holocron Hux stole off his old crew– the chasm lies below the pyramid, behind several not-so-secret doors. Hux proceeds to the outermost door, a massive slab of rock set within an even more massive wall of rock, and places the holocron in a small indentation. The holocron will serve two purposes. Its first is as a key, which will surely unlock the door within seconds…

Nothing happens.

Though the map inside seems accurate, the holocron itself must not be a Sith original– the danger of nicking stuff off of known forgers.

Hux pulls out his Sith translator, cussing. He cusses again after scanning the inscriptions that outline the door: _“Two together may open the door of the Sith.”_

“Well, I haven’t bloody got anyone else,” he spits, “have I?”

His words echo through the darkness.

With a groan, he looks at the door again, running calculations. Trudges back to the ship. Returns with himself, and a pocketful of thermal detonators.

.

Sith doors are no match for state-of-the-art explosives, stolen from either the First Order or the Resistance and now planted with a master engineer’s insight. Within the hour Hux has carved a smoking path through the temple base, arriving at the chasm. At the Chasm, rather. Despite a lack of precision in every other respect, Sith scrolls are particular about their capitalization.

He arrives at a grand black hall, sculpted on a titanic scale with hard lines and triangles. The walls glimmer, their black stone inscribed with glowing red.

Across the center of the room cuts the Chasm. It’s not an endless abyss, surely– even Temples of the Force should respect planets’ finite diameters– yet it swallows light, unnaturally ravenous.

For the first time, Hux shivers and wonders if he’s properly thought this through.

But the texts are clear. Even the weak can gain Force powers by consuming Malachor’s ashes, and Hux could use that power. He was born to change a galaxy and save it from its own disorder, but Starkiller failed. The First Order fell to the Final Order, then the Resistance.

An objective fact: Armitage Hux was born weak.

He opens the flask. The tea, normally a honey-brown, has turned grey and frothy. By fanning the scent towards his nostrils he smells it and gets a pleasant whiff of formaldehyde.

Another objective fact: Armitage Hux is thin as the paper tea bag still dangling in his cup and just as useless. He was born to change a galaxy, to save it from its own self-destruction, yet he is innately disadvantaged in a world of Force wielders, of telepaths and mind-trickers. Thus far, his intellect has proved unworthy of the challenge.

But he’s not dead yet.

He lives in a galaxy of Resistance heroes, now flaunting their war credentials and clawing to the top of the new peacetime government. Technically, he’s a hero too. The Resistance celebrates him as a symbol of redemption, trumpeting an amusing and entirely fabricated version of his “change of heart.” They claim that he had a genuine political revelation, that he martyred himself and died as a true lover of democracy. Arkanis held a parade.

The galaxy may lose some of their cheer upon discovering that he’s still inconveniently alive, since it’s easier to appreciate the dead. But he can still play this game. If he reveals himself to the galaxy, he might be able to claw his way back to power. Arkanis can elect him king and Senator after that. He can infiltrate this new incarnation of the New Republic. He can twist it to his will, he can rule as Chancellor, he can make himself Grand Marshal yet.

(What he’d _do_ with a galaxy to rule, he’s never quite figured out.)

But before that he has another problem to solve: he _can’t_ rule the galaxy, weak as he is. Over and over he’s proven himself unworthy of the honor. For galactic domination, he needs both power and the wit to use it cleverly, and thus he needs the Chasm.

The Ritual of the Chasm has three hard requirements: a person who has consumed Malachor’s ashes, the Chasm, and the declaration of desire. But it’s well-established that any Sith ritual can be helped along with a well-chosen “focus”– something that’s both object and symbol, to represent what it is you want. It’s the main reason why Hux has brought a holocron, a repository of knowledge, for he needs training. The ashes will grant him power in the dark side of the Force. He must learn how to master it. 

According to the scrolls, the Chasm refuses particularly arrogant requests– no resurrections, no instant empires– and so he’ll start small. He’ll ask that only one sliver of his ambition be fulfilled. He’s scripted and practiced his declaration: “I desire the power to read minds, with at least as much skill as _Kylo Ren.”_

(He’s not obsessed at all.)

Hux takes a step towards the chasm, tea bubbling in his grip. His first step back towards power, towards saving the galaxy, towards _mattering_ to anyone besides himself _._ Or perhaps it’s his first step towards death, for all his precious scrolls might be fakes. The ritual might be a mere century-old lie, and the ashes might be plain carbonite, ready to scrape his insides open like ordinary gravel and doom him to a bloody death.

(There’s no one to come looking for him. If he dies here, choking on the edge of a lost world’s abyss, no one left would care.)

(Perhaps no one ever cared.)

Hux drinks. He grimaces at first, the tarine tea overdone and sweetened far past his limits. Then he nearly gags as the aftertaste hits, a delicate mix of paint fumes and rotten fish. The texture’s the worst aspect of all, so dreadful he can barely swallow. It scrapes his throat, rough and grainy like wet sand. 

Two sips in, he decides he hates it, but he’s never listened to his own limits before. He’ll hardly start now. In a few mighty gulps he chugs down the entire mixture, shuts the flask, and places it back in his pocket. He reaches once more for the holocron, stashed in his trousers, but his hand jerks away of its own volition.

It occurs to him that Sith magic may not be the safest choice of recreational activity.

Hux scowls and pushes his hand back down. It takes effort, as if he’s pushing against the Force itself, as when Ren had reached out in the damn throne room and forced him to his knees–

_Would you claim the power of all the Sith?_

A woman’s voice rings in Hux’s head, rich and laden with some ancient accent, and he’s down on his knees again. The red of the walls suddenly flashes, crackling against the black like sparks. He reaches again for the holocron, and again his arm snaps away against his will. It lands on the broken saber he’d stolen from the battlefield, and he closes his fist around it, because this at least could be a focus, at least he could ask for physical prowess–

 _Did you imagine that_ you _could be worthy of the Sith’s magic?_

The world tilts sideways and goes black.

_That what you wanted would ever matter?_

The declaration escapes his mind, all the plots and ancient texts disintegrating, and his skull throbs, trying to burst from the inside out. 

The last word to slip away is “Ren.”

.

Hux comes back to himself on the _Steadfast._ At first he recognizes it by the cold alone, for Allegiant General Pryde had blatantly disregarded the Order’s atmosphere control guidelines and kept his ship several degrees under the ideal temperature– to set everyone on edge, no doubt. Then the conference room shifts slowly into focus. Blue-grey walls with massive, blockish grates. Polished black seats with nearly triangular backs. At the center, a table of beveled obsidian, shined to a mirror’s perfection.

An inconsistency confirms this as a hallucination: the lights are too low. No self-respecting Order ship would leave their bulbs so under-powered. The Order preferred to lose its troopers in combat, not workplace accidents.

Also, all the chairs but his own are occupied by Sith.

Hux squints in the darkness, trying to pick out faces. There’s Sith Ladies mixed in with the Lords. Going by the shapes and sizes, they come from a mix of species, some now extinct. He can’t make out the faces. They seem to share Ren’s predilection for hideous masks.

 _Armitage Hux,_ rings a silvery, bell-like voice. It suffuses the room, coming from everywhere at once, and he can’t guess which of the figures is speaking. _You have claimed the power of all the Sith. Thus you will gain power beyond your most magnificent imaginings._

“I don’t know,” mutters Hux. “My imaginings are particularly magnificent.”

A many-voiced chuckle rumbles through the room.

_You are a worthy ally to us, Starkiller. We shall be your teachers. We shall give you the knowledge you seek, we shall bring a galaxy to your feet, we shall reward you for your ingenuity and courage. All that’s required is an even exchange._

There’s the rub. He tilts his head, silently inviting them to elaborate. 

_We have waited a thousand years, paralyzed, hungry for we knew not what. You know the feeling we speak of._

Hux’s first instinct is to deny it. He can’t though, not when he’s been possessed by a relentless, aimless melancholy ever since he left the Order. 

(Ever since Starkiller.)

_You know the horror of potential unrealized. The raging flames buried in your organs, with no way to escape…_

He could point out that flames don’t exactly rage without free access to air, but he keeps his mouth shut.

 _You know_ our _rage. And you shall be General, Allegiant General, Grand Marshal of the Sith army!_

On hearing “Allegiant General,” he turns slightly nauseous, though that may just be the churning ashes.

_You have simply to claim your army. Stand here before us and declare, proud and precise, “I want all the Sith of Malachor to be released from their stone prisons!”_

There’s an awkward silence.

Hux blinks. “I...don’t want all the Sith released from their stone prisons. I can get an army of my own, thank you—“

 _This_ , exclaims a new speaker, with a slithering, oily voice. _This is why we never let you negotiate, Umbra. You’re transparent, of course he saw through you—“_

 _If you didn’t interrupt me, how would we know?_ retorts the bell-like voice. _If you hadn’t interrupted_ all of us _when your cursed superweapon malfunctioned, who knows what heights we’d have reached?_

Hux winces in sympathy.

 _Unfreezing us is irrelevant_. A third voice booms thunderous. _Our physical forms are worthless next to our power in the Force. We need only a fleet, and one agent to command it. He shall be our newest agent. He shall be all the Sith, and through him the Sith Empire shall once more rule the galaxy!_

 _Quiet, you doshing fool!_ exclaims the slippery voice. _Have you still not learned that your dark plans will work better if you don’t monologue about them at every possible opportunity?_

 _So._ The old-fashioned accent resurges, the one Hux heard first when he was still conscious. _You intend to claim the Sith’s power without giving anything in return?_

“...Yes. That’s exactly the plan.”

_Thief!_

_Coward!_

_Unworthy!_

_Worthless!_

Everyone leaps from their chairs, converging on him. The Sith Lady directly across from him gets there first, bounding across the table, cloaks swirling misty around her. Her leathery grey hands clap him on the temples.

.

Hux comes to curled up in a ball, face wedged against his knees, body wedged into the corner of a room. The smooth hum of a particularly well-maintained ship embraces him. When he lifts his head, he knows this place on sight. The windows show the black of space. The walls are sleek and silver, shelves loaded with treasure– half Sith in origin, the rest plundered from Naboo.

He’s a child of five years and useless, locked on Palpatine’s personal yacht as he escapes the falling Empire.

A shake of the head. He may be useless but he’s forty years old, collapsed by a precipice on Malachor. This is all a ruse meant to trick him somehow–

“Armitage?”

In the doorway stands Rae Sloane, her uniform a spotless white as always. Black and grey curls fan around her face, backlit by gentle silver light like a halo.

It’s not an illusion, the way his breath catches.

“Grand Admiral.”

“I always wondered what you’d make of yourself,” she says, her voice warm, Imperial accent impeccably crisp. “You had fire in your eyes, even when you were so young.”

“Why are you here?” he says cautiously. “Why can I see you?”

She lifts an eyebrow. “I’m dead. But thanks to your recent risk-taking, that poses no barrier to our conversation.”

Hux nods slowly, digesting this statement, unfolding his limbs and rising unsteadily to his feet. 

“And what do you make of me?” he asks, effortfully keeping his voice steady.

She saunters towards him, her polished boots clacking too loud on the floor.

“I could see you as a general, an engineer, an emperor…” 

He is small, half his adult height, and she kneels to see him eye to eye. Her hand brushes his cheek, and he shivers, shaken to the core.

They remain that way for a minute, eyes locked. At last she remarks, “I never thought you’d turn into a traitor.”

She says it neutrally, with no change but for the sudden steel in her eyes. Hux teeters on the brink of tears.

“Why?” she murmurs.

The Resistance claims that he underwent a political transformation, blossoming from an imperialist to a champion of democracy. Hux settles for a lie slightly less blatant.

“I turned spy because I didn’t trust Pryde,” he says slowly. “He was obfuscating half the time and lying the rest. I couldn’t trust him, or the Final Order he represented.” Hux flounders, wounded more deeply by her seeming disappointment than he’d like to admit. “You worked against the Emperor too at times, for the good of the Empire itself.”

“Your doubt of the Final Order was well-founded.”

Hux widens his eyes, guileless and childlike.

“Palpatine was shattered,” she declares. “In his later years, he lost the clarity of vision that brought him to power. By the end he was psychologically unfit to rule.”

“Will I be fit to take his place, do you think?” he whispers. “Or is there an ally that I should seek? If I can speak to the dead, even a ghost will do.”

She stops to ponder the question, seemingly deep in thought. “There’s someone frozen on Malachor. A Jedi historian by the name of Kreia– wise and learned in the ways of the Force, with the good judgment you need to lead a galaxy. Ask the Chasm for her, and her alone, to be released from the carbonite.”

Hux frowns. “I thought you can’t outright resurrect anyone with the Ritual.”

“She is not dead, only dormant in the rock.” 

Hux chews his lip the way he used to when he was five, stalling. As he stalls, he forms a series of deductions. If asked who should lead a galaxy, the real ghost of Rae Sloane would recommend only herself. Therefore this ghost is not real, merely an illusion, and the “Jedi historian Kreia” likely doubled as “Darth Kreia” and is currently posing as Sloane to manipulate him. 

The Sith are in his head. 

But Hux can cling to glitches in the illusion– incorrect constellations beyond the window, an occasional breeze that doesn’t belong in a spaceship. An odd sense of detachment.

Most importantly, the Sith are willing to stab each other in the back— Kreia placed too much emphasis on “her alone”– but they each require at least a show of Hux’s consent to get what they want from the Chasm. They’ll fight it out, yanking him back and forth, exploiting his memories and deceiving all his senses, until he gives one of them what they want.

The scrolls did _not_ mention this petty, magical tug-of-war. You’d think the possibility of losing your mind to a load of ancient crockpots would merit a couple footnotes.

Hux hasn’t seen this ship since he was five years old, but he knew his specifications even then. He stalls. Makes his calculations.

“That’s a fascinating idea,” he says at last. “I think my only question is…”

He bolts.

The escape pods are precisely where they’re supposed to be, down a hallway and tucked into a wall. He unlocks one, jumps in, and blasts into space–

.

He comes to with a stinging cheek. Just in time, he ducks another punch.

Brendol Hux is back.

No. He struggles against the first stab of panic, because Brendol Hux isn’t alive. The Sith deal in deception and symbols and terror. This is just a symbol.

Unfortunately, it’s a potent one.

The vision of Brendol hauls him to his feet by his shirt collar. Hux forces his eyes open, first to see his father’s face– fleshy and red and still untouched by bacta– and then his own teenage bedroom. He scrambles to find something _off_ about the vision, something to assure himself this is all a lie–

“You useless sack of cells,” says Brendol, spittle flying in Hux’s face.

Hux shudders at the words, for they’re cruel and entirely too true to life. But the voice is inaccurate, wrapping all around Hux, magically booming from every direction. He remembers this thunder, from that insufferable Sith conference. This is the Sith Lord accused of revealing his plans too easily. 

How useful.

Brendol thrusts him back against the wall. His skull crashes against concrete, the pain cutting all too real, and Hux yelps like he would if this was real. It comes to him so easily, the memory of terror etched into every neuron from childhood. He plays his role and falls to his knees, face shielded uselessly by his outstretched hands.

“Please,” he gasps. “Please stop.”

Brendol does stop when asked– another glaring inaccuracy.

“You brought it all crumbling down,” he roars, towering over Hux. “The Sith Empire would have risen if not for you.”

“How do I fix it?” he mewls. His voice cracks, having regressed to its adolescent weakness. “I want to, but I don’t know how–”

“You must resurrect the Sith fleet. A whole navy, each ship armed with a superlaser to outmatch Malachor’s…”

“But...” Hux lets his jaw wobble pitifully. “But Palpatine had a Sith armada, didn’t he? And thousands of cultists, and vats full of cloned Snokes?” He shakes his head, visibly quivering. “Even if I hadn’t interfered, it would’ve gone down like a child’s block tower. The technology failed–”

“Not the technology,” spits Brendol. “It was made with all the brilliance of all the Sith.”

“Then _why_ did it all go wrong?” Hux pleads.

It’s real, this pleading. He wants answers.

“Did you never wonder why Palpatine acted so stupidly in his final days? Why he had unprecedented power in the Force, and no common sense to go with it?”

Horror dawns on Hux’s face, as if he’s never considered the matter before. “I simply...I assumed…”

“You would assume, you twit,” Brendol cuts him off on cue. “Darth Sidious asked for that fleet at the Chasm, and for Force-sensitive clones to do his bidding. The Ritual of the Chasm granted him all that _and_ the power to move through space; _that’s_ how he fled the Death Star to rise anew!”

“But you...you want me to repeat the same plan,” Hux snivels, once Brendol pauses his monologuing to breathe. “The Sith fleet failed already, why would I succeed where Palpatine failed–”

“Because,” he snarls, “from the moment _Palpatine_ ate the ashes, he had all the Sith in his head. And they battled for dominance, and with every new reign came a new agenda. By the end his main goal was flipping every few seconds.”

Hux stares at him, genuinely astounded.

“And why,” he finally asks, “wouldn’t that happen where I’m concerned?”

“Because you’ll also ask the Chasm to banish every other Sith from your head but Darth Nocte, the most powerful and respected of all the Sith.”

“Or?” Hux lifts his eyebrows, daring to taunt. 

Brendol’s eyes flash with shock. Then he growls.

The flurry of blows resumes, but Hux dodges this time, staggering to his feet and subtly checking whether his clothing is historically accurate. He was thirteen when he started keeping the monomolecular blade up his sleeve.

It’s there, waiting.

With a flick of the wrist he unsheathes it and jams it into Brendol’s torso, and the phantom goes down with a few well-placed slices. He thought it might disappear into thin air, but it stays pleasantly solid, simply bleeding out quite realistically on the ground. As Hux watches it die, he’s content, merrier than he’s felt in years.

.

Hux wakes up with a lurch and a headache, swaying in the center of the _Supremacy’s_ throne room. The room is restored to the height of its glory, the walls painted in pristine blood-red. On Snoke’s grand triangular throne sits a young Dathromirian man, his face tattooed in black and gold. He sits still as a statue, waiting.

“No impersonations this time?” Hux at last comments. “You’re not going to channel my childhood nanny droid, slap me around a bit?”

The man snorts. “Darth Traya and Darth Nocte are both overly enamoured of indirection.”

Hux lifts his chin, recognizing that smooth, slippery voice. “You made Malachor’s superweapon.”

He acknowledges it with a nod. “The rest disrespect you, but I? I sense a kindred spirit.”

Two failed engineers. Hux would laugh at their mutual patheticness, but he keeps his face still and simply glances about the room. It’s an accurate portrayal of Snoke’s throne room before Rey and Ren and the Praetorian Guards wrecked it all, but it’s not how he remembers this place.

(He remembers this place only in nightmares.)

“You propose a partnership?” Hux says, low and wary.

“I do.”

“An empire subjugated by our joint genius?”

“Precisely.”

Ren had offered the girl an empire in this very spot, when the blood-red walls had been burned away to reveal black. Hux watched the footage himself, when he was trying to understand Ren’s first act as Supreme Leader.

(When Hux’s own throat still burned from the fingerprints Ren hadn’t left.)

“They underestimate us,” says the Sith Lord, voice thrumming with rage repressed. “Always. Malachor’s weapon wouldn’t have backfired if they _listened_ when I told them how to use it. The others trample our plans and crush us to dust.” 

Hux looks sharply at him, for those words are so obviously designed to slice deep. The Sith Lord’s golden lips curl.

“That’s why you turned, after all,” he adds slyly. “You didn’t lie. You needed Kylo Ren to lose.”

Curtly, Hux confirms it. “It’s the most honest I ever got.”

He elaborates: “Because Kylo Ren broke your Starkiller, when he was your closest ally. He was your lover, and yet he let a band of Jedi-loving ruffians blow your masterpiece to pieces. How could you possibly let him go without exacting revenge?”

For the first time since all the Sith invaded his head, Hux feels a real pang of indignation. 

This Darth Tattoo has pawed at a private scene. Perhaps they all have. Perhaps they’ve all lined up to view the flight from Starkiller, when Ren had gazed up at him with a broken face and feverish eyes and Hux had raged at him for five hours for letting Starkiller burn. He’d broken it off with Ren that night, allegedly for Starkiller’s sake. And when Hux decided to turn spy some five years back, he did try telling himself it was the only fitting revenge for Starkiller.

That rationalization rings so clearly false, now.

But this Sith Lord doesn’t seem to notice that, and Hux doesn’t correct him.

“Do you want revenge against the other Sith?” asks Hux.

“I did once.” He shrugs, the black of his cloak shimmering with the movement. “I spent my first five centuries as a statue hating them all, plotting their fiery destruction. But as I had nothing else I could do at the time, I at last refocused on my primary goal. The Sith Empire.”

“What should I ask the Chasm for, to get your goal? Should I ask for all Sith statues besides yours to...crumble to dust?”

“Ah, there’d be no point to crumbling, you’d need to make them vanish outright. Or you could expose them to a sustained inferno,” he adds thoughtfully.

Hux snorts.

“Besides that,” his Royal Tattooedness continues, “I’d prefer to let the Sith live. We need only to channel their impulses towards productive ends. I’d ask for Malachor’s superweapon to be repaired– a matter of sentiment, you understand– and for...hm. Unfettered access to the minds of some current Senators, whomever you’d consider most helpful. We could ask the Chasm for more gifts later, as needed.”

“How long,” Hux says, guarded, “do you think it’ll take to take over the galaxy?”

The Sith Lord hums and presses long, obsidian fingers together. “Not long, now that we have you. The main obstacle is usually that we’re bound in stone, with no physical agent– most people who partake of the ashes don’t consume enough to be influenced. Palpatine was our first proper chance at freedom, and we squandered it so foolishly. I can only hope my brethren have learned.”

He lets out a long weary sigh. Hux aims for a look of sympathy.

“You have no other way to spread your influence?” Hux probes.

“There was another ritual–”

Hux nearly groans.

“– by which we attempted to forcibly possess the scavenger girl. Unfortunately she cut herself off from life rather than let us in.”

Whereas Hux came knocking on all the Sith’s door, so perhaps they feel some sincere goodwill towards him.

Perhaps the offers of partnership are real.

“Ally with me,” the man resumes, each syllable clear and mighty, “and you shall have your empire. Now that you’re here, I estimate it’ll take five years at the most to have all the galaxy in your palm.” 

He spreads his hands wide, magnanimous, and Hux bows his head and honestly _considers it._

This is what Hux said he wanted, after all. He said he wanted Force powers. He said he wanted the power of the Sith, leading him to an empire that would rival the Sith.

On the other hand, he has quite the history of self-delusion.

He tries to clear his mind, to achieve that meditative serenity Ren was always grasping for. He doesn’t know what he wants. He can’t imagine a world where an empire _matters_ to him once he has it, not when the joy was always in the chase. 

If he’s honest, what he most sincerely wants is–

“Starkiller. Will you accept?”

The Sith Lord rattles him from his reverie, and Hux knows what he wants at least in this moment. He can feel the ashes now, the power of the Force thrumming raw and black in his veins, and though he is untrained, all these Sith Lords can call up scenes from his memory. Why can’t he do the same?

And as Hux looks this Sith dead in the eyes, he conjures up a vision of the Resistance’s flagship rotating its course outside these walls, not far away from the _Supremacy._ He imagines it jumping to lightspeed.

With a crack, the throne room explodes.

.

The ashes are working.

There’s a swarm of other Sith straining to grab onto him, to drag him into their own personalized twisted fantasy. Hux instead drags them into his. He remembers the setting, the stage, the snow, as if it was yesterday.

He remembers the firing of Starkiller.

He clasps his hands– gloved, as they should be– behind his back. He doesn’t need to look to know the scene: the red banner draped behind him, the black gaberwool coat swirling regally around his legs. This setting is perfectly accurate, for Starkiller at the height of its glory is sewn into his very soul. The only change is the audience.

He’s replaced the troopers with all the Sith. Forced into neat rows, they fidget and glare up at him. He glares right back.

“You all claim to be the rightful rulers of the galaxy,” he roars, his own voice rolling to the mountains. “‘All the Sith.’ All _I_ see is a squadron of misprogrammed pit droids, battling each other for the same spool of bonding tape!”

They mumble some response. Posed high above them, he can barely hear it and doesn’t care to.

“Here is what I want.” He enunciates viciously, so the magic in the Chasm and in his veins will have no choice but to hear. “I want _all_ the Sith banished _permanently from my head.”_

He squints down at them. With an unceremonious _pop,_ the cloaked figures disappear into thin air.

He’s alone again.

He stands alone on Starkiller at the height of its glory, with nothing and no one but the wind.

Lowering his voice, he adds, “I want to know how I might use this ritual to help the galaxy...”

“The galaxy.” That’s what he ought to say, but the declaration lacks conviction.

“...and myself.”

That’s better.

Mental clarity strikes like a blaster bolt to the head. At once he recognizes that he doesn’t want an empire. He never has.

“I want to be free of all hurt and damage inflicted by the Force for the rest of my life–”

He has a bad feeling about this declaration, the second after he makes it.

In the distance, Starkiller’s thermal oscillator explodes.

.

Hux cannot fight the current this time. Like a flash flood the Force hurls him into a new scene, into Starkiller’s forest as the planet rumbles below. He knows the fall of Starkiller intimately from his nightmares, knows the smoke on the breeze and the ash on his tongue. He must run faster than he can, for the snow and rock shall split and reveal chasms under his feet. He runs, and he wonders whether he’s roused the Force to anger, whether the Chasm of Malachor has at last tired of his impudence and rejected his request.

The ground splits, revealing magma.

In an instant Hux is keenly aware of the insidious ashes now lining his esophagus, the ground-up dust smoldering much like magma within him. He has soaked himself with the dark side of the Force, and it twists and burns every cell it touches. In his lust for power he destroyed himself, distilling the Force’s darkest powers into toxic powder and drinking the poison willingly.

The ashes blaze inside him, festering, taunting. The self-inflicted wound gapes in his core. He tries to let go of the darkness, he wills the wound to sew itself back up, but his efforts fail. 

Hux doesn’t have it in him to heal himself.

So he stops trying. There’s no point to running. This vision of a trembling planet is merely a symbol of his impending, self-inflicted doom. The contradiction may kill him, for he asked to be free of the Force’s damage for the rest of his life and yet has utterly ruined himself with the Force. If he cannot heal himself, the easiest way to reconcile the goals is his death.

(Perhaps this is the best way the Force knows to help him and the galaxy– severing him from his wretched life.)

This vision of Ilum shall burst under his feet. Part of him died with the real Starkiller, and now this illusion can claim the rest of him.

“I want–”

The sulfur of the magma chokes him, seizing the words “to live” from his mouth before he can get them out.

He falls to his knees. Closes his eyes, seeking out some last light in the darkness.

.

Hux doesn’t recall why he’s here. He recognizes Starkiller’s forest, and the earthquake, but the ash-laden smoke disorients him. There was something about a ritual, something about the Sith. It doesn’t matter anymore.

He pushes himself to his feet, because there is only one thing to remember, only one thing he can possibly need when Starkiller is falling. Only one person he must seek.

Like last time, he stumbles forward, dizzied by smoke and shaken by the planet itself.

Like last time, he sobs.

He’s tried to block out this moment. For over five years he’s refused to confront what he’d felt in Starkiller’s forest, but he’s reliving it all now in brutal clarity. Hux remembers learning that Starkiller was doomed, that he had lost the only thing he loved and that he might soon lose the only person, too. And he recalls the horror that dawned soon afterwards, the discovery that he could survive a galaxy without Starkiller but not one without Ren. 

(It had to be weakness, the way Hux trembled, the way he wept at the thought of his own greatest rival dying. It had to be his greatest weakness.)

And because he couldn’t risk a world where Ren’s death would ruin him too, Hux saved Ren and pushed him away the same night. In his tearful rant on the ship from Starkiller, he’d renounced the vows they’d made. He tried to cut Ren out of his heart, to avoid being crushed by the magnitude of his own love.

Last time, he’d cursed and sobbed and staggered through the snow as Starkiller fell, and eventually he’d found Ren.

There’s no such hope now. Still, Hux wanders this hallucination and looks for his love. For Ren. For Ben Solo. The revelation rolls through him: if he could, he’d keep that peculiar, infuriating man all for himself. He’d forsake all others, keep _himself_ only unto Ren. He’d have Ren, and hold Ren, and love none but Ren for the rest of his own pitiful life.

“Ben Solo!” he cries, like last time. Ren had recognized only that old name, delirious as he was from smoke and pain. He’d heard that name and called back to Hux.

This time, there is no answer.

Hux sprints forth until the last moment, increasingly sure that suffocation will kill him before the fire can. It doesn’t matter. Not when his life ended five years back. What he wants most is Ren, who disappeared into thin air five years back.

Hux gags again as something– perhaps a particularly blockish chunk of debris– forces itself past his lips. With a mighty rumble Starkiller shatters entirely, throwing its fire up, up, spewing all its kyber into the void of space, and thus Armitage Hux dies–

.

Hux wakes up.

He’s lying next to the Chasm of Malachor. The world feels _crisp,_ as the hallucinations never did; this must be reality. 

Unfortunately in reality, Hux’ mouth tastes dreadful, somehow _worse_ than before. His head aches. His hand aches more, horrendously sore from clutching that broken blue lightsaber. His coat is gone.

Also, his head happens to be in Ben Solo’s lap.

Hux needs answers. In the time it takes him to push himself up to a more dignified sitting position, legs dangling over the abyss, he compiles a list of twenty questions and begins with the most important.

“Why’d you steal my bloody coat?”

Ben Solo sits cross-legged next to him, hair unruly, face slightly sweaty but entirely unscarred. With one look at his smile– it breaks like a sunbeam across his whole face– Hux knows Kylo Ren is gone. This is Ben Solo, and he’s filched the pilot’s black overcoat for himself, and he fills it out better than Hux ever could. 

(With one daring look downwards, he discovers Ben isn’t wearing anything _besides_ the coat.)

Ben looks back at him. His expression mirrors Hux’s, caught between amusement and consternation. “Why are _you_ alive?”

“Why are _you_ alive?” Hux snaps right back.

“Answer me first!”

“Chest armor,” he answers briskly, even as he reviews all the scrolls he’s ever read to verify that no, the Chasm doesn’t do resurrections. _“Why_ are you alive?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?” Ben says, infuriating as ever. “I was perfectly fine until you summoned me into the bottom of this pit.”

Eyes darting between the abyss and Ben, Hux scoffs. “I did no such thing.”

“Just me,” he insists with growing amusement. “Not a stitch of my clothing. That’s why I took the coat.”

Hux gapes.

“What exactly were you trying to accomplish here?” Ben prods.

“I was…” Hux blinks owlishly, feeling rather like a droid stuck in a loop. “The scrolls say I’d get what I wanted–”

“That explains the lack of clothing,” he snorts.

“This isn’t funny!”

“Really?” Ben’s laughing now, his whole body shaking with it. “I leave you alone for _five minutes_ and you start performing Sith rituals?”

“Five years!”

Ben stops laughing. “What?”

Hux pauses, momentarily lost for words. “You’ve been dead for five years.”

Gradually, Ben’s smile fades. 

“I’ve never died,” he declares, sounding entirely certain. “Not for the galaxy’s lack of trying.”

“Rey said you disappeared into thin air on Exegol–”

He scrunches up his brow. “How do you know that? It was less than fifteen minutes ago…”

He trails off, seeing Hux’s slow, solemn shake of the head.

.

For the first time since Hux’s rather one-sided post-Starkiller rant, they talk.

.

“You never died,” Hux intones. “I just...dragged you into the future.”

“Yeah, I seem to have skipped the last five years.”

Hux sputters for a moment, torn between wonder and horror at the Force’s utter disregard for causality. “But why’d the Force decide to remove you _at that moment,_ at the battle of Exegol? _”_

“Were you feeling possessive, when you called my name?”

“I suppose I was. Why would that matter?” Hux realizes a second later. “...Rey.”

He nods in agreement, wincing. “Right before I vanished into thin air, Rey and I were, uh, having a moment.”

“A moment?” Hux deadpans.

“A moment,” he says, achingly sincere, “that’s all. Our bond was always delicate, more magic than actual feeling, and Palpatine burned away all the magic.”

Ben’s eyes are wide and guileless in the dark, begging Hux to believe him. Hux does.

.

“The ashes were strangling you,” Ben murmurs, fingers playing with Hux’s novel brown hair, gently brushing the nape of his neck. “I could feel it blazing like a volcano. I had to climb out as fast as I could to save you.”

“By forcibly purging them from my system?”

“...Turns out you do have a gag reflex.”

.

“She named herself Rey Skywalker _?”_

“Rey and Finn Skywalker,” Hux recounts. “They’ve started up a Jedi school, I hear only positive things.”

“Yes, but Rey _Skywalker?”_

.

“Why’d you turn spy?”

“Ah.” Hux winces. “I shouldn’t have cut you out after Starkiller, and I shouldn’t have expected special consideration after I did…” He closes his eyes and lets out a long exhale. “But I hated what you did, the day you became Supreme Leader. And I needed you to regret it with every fiber in your body, and the only way I could arrange _that_ was to reframe it as the worst tactical choice you ever made.”

It’s the full truth. He feels light as paper, having at last confessed it to himself.

“I do regret it with every fiber in me,” Ben agrees. “But not because it was bad strategy.”

“Why else would–”

“Because you never deserved to be hurt.”

.

“I’m sorry.”

They say it together, then break off chuckling.

.

“So here we have a planet of hibernating Sith, forever plotting to take over the galaxy.”

Hux leads them both back out of the temple. He gestures jauntily at the battlefield littered with statues, like a particularly perky tour guide.

Ben folds his arms and scowls at them all. “No wonder the Force is out of balance.”

“We could go back to the Chasm and ask it to vanish them all.”

“How about you lay off the Sith rituals for a couple days?”

Hux laughs, inching perilously towards _giggling._ “There’s another option. According to the intel I gathered–” with considerable efficiency and elegance too, he’s the best damn spy alive and those Sith never stood a chance– “a ‘sustained inferno’ will do the trick.”

“Please tell me you haven’t built another Starkiller.”

“I won’t need one. Not when we’ve got a kyber ray with enough power to blow up a planet, just inside that temple.”

Ben’s jaw quivers from a smile suppressed. “...Got any thermal detonators?”

Hux throws his head back with a merry cackle.

.

They strip the freighter entirely of explosives and embed them around the temple’s superweapon, designing a blast that will collapse the entire planet. The Force guides Ben, allowing him to identify weak points and levitate bombs into particularly delicate nooks. Hux has no Force powers since expelling the ashes– good riddance, he never _really_ cared for the Force anyhow. In his opinion, his expertise with precisely this sort of superweapon is even more useful, and he unearths one vulnerability after another.

They work seamlessly, one man with blinding power in the Force, the other immune to all its threats. 

(They’ve vowed to wipe out every remnant of the Sith, together, and Hux has his purpose again.)

For now, they wipe out the ship’s supply cupboards. They empty the armory. Ben dismantles the medkit and slathers an entire bottle of bacta on assorted bones, still bashed up from Exegol. For his part, Hux uses up an entire bottle of mouthwash.

Once all they’ve rigged up their explosives just so, they retreat to the cockpit. Hux takes the co-pilot’s seat. Ben claims the pilot’s. They glide back through the smog into the clear void of space, maneuvering towards a middle ground, close enough to have a clear view of Malachor but well outside the calculated blast zone. Ben fiddles with the controls, while Hux watches Malachor growing smaller in the window and strokes the remote detonator in his hand.

“Liar,” Ben suddenly jokes beside him, voice sweet and warm. “You said this was your ship.”

Glancing back at him, Hux frowns. “I am officially part of the crew. A murderous part, but the point stands.”

“Your name’s nowhere on here! Unless…”

Ben’s pulled up the manifest. Remarkably, Hux feels more embarrassed now than he has all day, as Ben gazes at the glowing text.

“...You call yourself ‘Solo,’ now.” 

His voice is tender with awe.

“It’s…” Hux nearly lies to them both, dismissing it as a matter of convenience. “It’s what felt right.”

Ben spins around in his cockpit chair to face him. “I’d kiss you, if I didn’t think it’d land me in a canyon on Moraband. Probably without my skin this time.”

Hux scowls. “Why would it ever–”

“What the hell.” Ben shrugs, then jerks forward. He stops just millimeters away.

Hux closes the distance, brushing their lips together.

As he pulls away, breathes deep and dives back in for a far deeper kiss, he presses the remote.

They kiss, and the galaxy shifts back into balance.

**Author's Note:**

> The [ ashes](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Ashes_of_Malachor) are a real canon thing. I can’t believe it either.


End file.
